Question about Windows 7 Aero :)

Someone please explain me one thing about aero feature. If I enable windows 7 aero theme, does it mean that its going to use my gpu to do certain tasks, it should be like an gpu acceleration or am I wrong? Now, if I would put my theme as windows 7 basic then there would be no gpu acceleration and all load would go on cpu?

Achaa: Hello and welcome to the forums. While everything you actually see on your monitor is a product of your video card augmented to some extent by your system memory, cpu as well as your hard drive (since that is where most things reside) and I think it is safe to say that Aero is not exactly a video accelerator you can also expect to see little or no negative impact on a modern well equipped machine with decent system resources. Microsoft attributes this for the most part to Aero's use of the Super Fetch feature and actually commisioned a study by an independent research company in the early days of Vista to help debunk claims by many that the Aero feature hogged to much in the way of available system resources. Here's a link to what Microsoft has to say regarding Aero and includes a link to the actual study as well. Hope this helps at least to some extent and thanks for joining our community Regards RandyThe results are in - Windows Performance Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

To add to what he said, if you are concerned about the performance impact while running aero, you can disable Windows Aero while any application you'd like is executed (you may have noticed Windows does the automatically on apps that do not support the interface). Simply right click the short-cut to the app and navigate to "Compatibility" under the Properties section. Here, select "Disable Visual Themes" and "Disable Desktop Composition".

Don't think you can set it to be that specific, at least I'm not aware of any method. See attachment. As far as the differenceLet me google that for you plenty of available information don't think I could explain it better.

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I don't think you will find a very clear explanation of the "difference" between prefetch and superfetch, as it relates to Windows 7. Prefetch was originally invented for XP. The name (and the folder in x.\Windows) has been carried forward as far as Windows 7. In fact, the folder is used to store the "prefetched" programs you use frequently, but the whole operation is now under the "Superfetch" badge. What you will find, by googling, is that there is no noticeable advantage, in the short and long term, in "tuning" or disabling Superfetch.